NEW YORK PLAY INDICTED.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 February 1920, Page 7

NEW YORK PLAY INDICTED.

.PASTOR'S CONDEMNATION. • "ORGY OF SENSUALITY." Clergymen in New York are engaged in a demand for the suppression of the new play "Aphrodite." They refuge to accept as- adequate the changes already made in the production, by which the scene of negroes mingling with white women is eliminated and the living 6tatue of Aphrodite is placed in shadow, | where the apparent nudity is not glaringly evident. The Bev. J. R. Stratton, the wellknown pastor of the fashionable Calvary Baptist Church, after seeing the play in the interest of morality, has issued a statement calling on the'mayor to prevent future performances, and add;ing:— "This show is everything that is vile and degrading. Nothing is left to the imagination. Every appeal is merely to the sensuous and fleshy. It is a nightmare of nude men and women, an orgy of sensuality and shame, with men and women, in a condition of almost complete undress, hugging each other, slobbering over each other, lolling on couches with each and dancing in feigned' drunken revelry together.. "The manager denies that there are any nude women in the play. If a chicken feather or two plastered at strategic points on the human body can by a charitable stretch of imagination be called covering, then we must say that the manager is technically correct. If this carrying on had occurred in New York's tenderloin district during the old days it would have caused a police raid and the arrest of everybody who participated in it- That is precisely what ought to be done with those engaged in this lewd and hideous performance. "If the promoters get by with this production I venture to prophesy that it will not be long before some theatrical manager a little more daring than the rest will take his chance, in expectation of heavy dividends, and portray on the stage scpiics of open shame. The time has come when we must either curb these evil tendencies or give up the fight and let the modern theatre go further and further in its godless and licentious course until it completely destroys the ideals on which Anglo-Saxon civilisation is built." The inhabitants of New York arc flocking to sec the play, and seats for every performance'are'sold out. One night's box-office, receipts amounted to £I2OO.